WHIPSTITCH

The first Alice Starmore–designed sweater I ever saw was called Golden Gate Bridge from her book Pacific Coast Highway. My friend Anne was wearing it and I had a difficult time focusing on the food on the table in front of me, or on Anne, who was visiting from out of town. Instead, I focused on the sweater’s graceful, swooping cables, unable to take my eyes off the iron girders evoked by the pattern. Anne’s sweater was the same rust red as the bridge, and I could almost smell the fog and hear the seagulls.

It was a piece of art—a warm, gorgeous representation of an architectural icon. It was incredible. I wanted it.

I’ve rarely experienced that level of covetousness in my life. If Anne had not been a friend, there’s a possibility I would have entered a life of crime that morning, out in the parking lot. “Tourist robbed of sweater, left in waffle-shop parking lot, shivering.”

But I refrained from robbery. I merely swallowed my jealousy with the last of my pancake and, as I was unable to foot the three-hundred-dollar eBay charge for the out-of-print Pacific Coast Highway pattern book, I headed instead to my nearest knitting store and found Starmore’s more recent The Celtic Collection.

I opened the book and tumbled headfirst into it. Cromarty, a boxy, intricately cabled pullover, grabbed me by the neck and shook me. In the pattern, the lanky redheaded model lounges on a rocky shoreline. Wild fiber lust filled my body. I had to have that sweater. Wearing it, I knew I’d probably end up spending a lot of time on a rugged coast too. It was inevitable in a garment like that.

In the pattern description, Starmore mentions the incorporated Celtic crosses, knotwork from the Nigg stone, and the Pictish stones of Eastern Scotland. Pictish! I didn’t even know what the word meant; I just knew I wanted to have something Pictish in my life. It sounded magical, as if the sweater itself would be casting runes for me. And a Nigg stone? Who knew? Who cared? It would be mine.

I blogged about wanting to make the sweater, and Michigan’s ThreadBear Fiber Arts offered to give me yarn if I knitted it as a shop model for their store. They’d display it for six months, and then they’d mail it back to me, a win-win situation. I agreed, and they sent me fifteen skeins of Koigu Kersti in a luscious variegated brown.

I sat down and picked up a US size four needle. I’m a loose knitter, after all. This was an important sweater—I was actually going to do a gauge swatch. I cast on. It didn’t work. I went down to a three. Then a two. Now, gauge is a bear sometimes. I tried not to care that while swatching I couldn’t get the right gauge in the DK-weight yarn until I went down to a US size one needle. It would be the same amount of stitches, no matter how tiny the needle was, right? How hard could it be?

Answer: so hard. I was used to knitting projects that could be worked in loud, crowded bars without difficulty. Cromarty was not that kind of knitting. I had to pay attention to the chart at the beginning of every single row. I started to wonder if the ThreadBear boys had placed too much trust in me. Maybe I just wasn’t a good enough knitter for this.

Ripping back, something I rarely did, something that normally reduced me to fits of swearing, became old hat. Knitters gasped as I pulled out the intricate inches of cable work. “No one will ever notice that miscrossed cable,” they told me, still pale from witnessing an hour of work unravel.

That had always been my line. I’d never understood why people needed their knitting to be perfect. People who reknit sleeves because they didn’t fit exactly right into the sleeve caps made me crazy. Instead, I’d push and pull, jiggering pieces of sweaters until they finally looked approximately right. Of course, that meant that while I ended up with some great sweaters, others hung oddly from my shoulders, and my bind-offs were sometimes a bit wonky. But it would never be noticed from a trotting horse, I thought (not that I’m around many folks on trotting horses), and I was fine with that.

But not so for Cromarty. She had to be perfect. Since I was making her to be placed on display, errors that I’d allow in other sweaters couldn’t be tolerated. When it was hung in the store, people would fondle the display model, pick it up, try it on, examine the seams. My name would be on it. I have a knitting blog. I write novels about knitting. I couldn’t bear the thought of the knitting world finding me out as someone who couldn’t knit a Starmore, and the nervousness was getting to me.

I thought about quitting and sending the yarn back.

I was never, ever going to finish this damn sweater, and, if I did, it would probably be ugly, only good as an around-the-house sweater, one that I’d wear while writing on cold afternoons when I knew I wouldn’t see anyone else, taking the place of the green Cal Poly sweatshirt with its ketchup stain.

But quitting would mean that I’d failed. So when I’d discover a miscrossed cable, I’d ladder down to it, correcting it on my way back up. While doing that, I’d see another incorrect cable to the side of it, so I’d rip back six or eight painful rows. Knitting back up, I’d inevitably find another error. The reverse side was always purl, so I’d rest on those rows, knowing the next row would kick my ass.

I gave myself permission to cry whenever I had to rip more than ten rows at once. I’d never cried so much over a piece of knitting. If I wasn’t actually on a rugged coastline, I was creating my own salt sea.

It was taking forever and the going was painful. But I tried to believe it wouldn’t beat me. I’d abandoned sweaters in progress when bored with them, but I’d never quit a sweater because it was too difficult. And while not an astonishingly fast knitter, I’m usually pretty speedy, averaging a sweater a month or so. Three months into knitting Cromarty, I was only done with the sleeves, and I already felt as if I’d given my whole life over to the project. I couldn’t think about anything else. I gave myself mini deadlines—knit to Row 62 by midnight—and I’d race to make them, introducing even more errors as I went. What’s more, every time I looked in the mirror I found more prematurely gray hairs, and I was pretty sure they were a direct result of Cromarty. I thought again about quitting but then rejected that idea as impossible. I was committed.

One night, as I drifted off to sleep thinking about the bottom hem of the back, I realized I was…perhaps a little obsessed. Okay, a lot obsessed. But where was the harm in that? I wasn’t out drinking in every bar in town, I wasn’t on drugs—my problems were soft and squooshy. Who cared? I forged ahead, dreaming of being the redhead on the coastline in the Cromarty photograph.

When I was three-quarters of the way through the fifteen skeins the shop sent me, I had a feeling that I might be in very real trouble. I’d finished only the sleeves and part of the back. There was no way I’d have enough yarn, and the Koigu was hand dyed by small batch in Canada. The shop sent more to me in the same colorway but from a different dye lot. It was awful, three shades lighter, completely unusable.

I sat in a corner gibbering for a little while. Cromarty was bigger to me now than just a display sweater, more than just a challenge. I wanted to be on that rugged coastline already, dammit! Only I was becoming a little nervous that the shore in question was actually going to be the Cromarty Firth, the bay in northeastern Scotland in which, just before World War II, the Royal Navy had laid out thirty miles of cable in order to detect and destroy German U-boats. I felt like I was swimming underwater laying the cables, but the cables weren’t made of steel, but merino, and it was getting difficult to hold my breath.

Koigu asked for a sample from my remaining yarn, and I shipped it northward along with prayers for favorable winds and excellent dye-pot luck. They sent back ten new skeins that matched perfectly, for a total of twenty five—my myriad cables gobbled the yardage, and I ended up using all of them.

When I sewed the sweater together and bound off at the neck, Cromarty was dense as felt, heavy as leather. With its gauge, though, the drape was lovelier than I could have predicted, and the intricacy of the cables was truly magnificent. It was a showstopper. I’d made it into the bay, safe and sound, and could finally come up for air. Now I had to find that coastline.

The finishing was strangely anticlimactic. There was no applause. Digit didn’t care. I took a few pictures and then, with nothing else to do, I packed it into a box and sent it away. I fought silly tears. Would they take good enough care of her there? Would customers be too rough with her? I couldn’t bear to think about it, so to get my mind off her, I cast on for a top-down raglan in heavy worsted wool. It felt like back floating after the underwater maneuvers I’d been performing, and I finished the simple stockinette sweater in two weeks.

Months later, when the box came back to me, I opened it carefully, reverentially. I lifted the sweater out, and even though it was a warm fall day, I layered it over a T-shirt, put the top down on my convertible, and drove across the Richmond Bridge to Dharma Trading in San Rafael. I didn’t even feel like shopping—I just wanted someone else to see it and recognize it for what it was.

It worked. As if it had been scripted, the first woman I saw in the store let out a yelp when she saw me.

“Starmore!” she cried. “Which book?”

“The Celtic Collection,” I said, blushing furiously in pleasure.

“Cromarty.” Another woman nodded. “I did that one too. Almost killed me.”

“I did this on size ones,” I said, unable to hide the pride in my voice.

The gasps were audible.

And there, surrounded by people who spoke my language, I was finally proud of myself. I’d done it. I’d made the sweater of my dreams, and I loved the way the accomplishment felt on my shoulders.

On my way home that day, I drove out to the Albany Bulb. The scrubby little outcropping of land juts into the San Francisco Bay and is populated only by wandering artists and people walking their dogs. As I walked in the wind, I considered the Pictish cables I was wearing. I’d researched them, finally, and learned that Alice Starmore had been inspired by the patterns for them from a stone from the late eighth century, found in a churchyard in Nigg, just across the bay from the town of Cromarty, where, twelve hundred years later, the miles and miles of cable would be laid underwater. Across the water from me, I grinned at the cables of the Golden Gate Bridge—each cable made of twenty-seven thousand strands of wire twisted around each other. For me, this sweater was my Golden Gate. It was my ridiculous challenge, accomplished.

I wore Cromarty on the rugged coastline and knew I was finally the knitter I wanted to be.